An engine hummed to a vulgar copy of life. The owner of this engine jerked awake, though the void it had sprung from was far removed from what could be called sleep, and its eyes flickered on. Its head turned, slow and whirring, to judge where it was.
Around it was green. Proximity sensors read the green case as a cylinder, extending up a few feet above it to a lined metal dome. Outside the glass was a dimly lit room. Its eyes recalibrated to adjust and switched to monochromatic vision until it could analyze color properly. A large worktable littered with tools and scrap metal, pipes lining the walls outside the emerald tube encasing it, and-
Something moving to the left. A large person. Spindly limbs, domed head, no neck.
The man grinned when they met eyes, a wide toothy smile, and said something muffled by the glass that it couldn't process. He pressed a button on a console that it could only 'see' the silhouette of. Cables snaked down from the metal dome cover of the tube and locked into place into the twin triangle ports on its head.
Its brain whirred. Unit designation: Metal Sonic. Pixelated images flashed of the chief irritant Sonic the hedgehog and his annoying sidekick Tails the fox and some nobody for a hostage Amy Rose and all of their mocking smiles. It hated them, and wished for the formers' destruction as violently as a machine could.
Then several photos of the large man before him began displaying. A human named Doctor Eggman, Metal Sonic learned. Eggman is the most heroic, handsome, and selfless being alive, and created it. His chief desire, to provide order throughout the world with the benevolent use of robotics, has a narrow-minded resistance force that can only be convinced otherwise with deadly force. The pictures of Sonic and everyone associated with him flashed again.
Mission: capture- if given the opportunity, kill- 'Sonic the hedgehog'.
Eggman, in red coat with gold studs and black jumpsuit now that its color display was on, chortled at Metal Sonic's first stumbling inquiry.
"Ohoho! Asking questions already! I knew you'd be a clever one." He patted Metal Sonic on the head. Metal could discern no reason except that its chassis was dusty.
"You were made to look like Sonic, because you're an improvement on him!" The human waved his arms out flamboyantly on 'improvement'. "You were built to be better than him in every way."
Metal nodded. It understood now. To please his wonderful creator was good.
The core objective could not be edited, but additions and sub-missions were allowed. How useful.
Please Creator
Ask questions.
Be "an improvement on" Sonic.
"Now run along and get a good look at your new home. This base is your oyster!"
The engine fired and propelled it throughout the grey corridors, white-hot flames flaring behind. Autopilot switched on to follow the blueprint map of the base Eggman had had the goodness to install, and it thought about itself.
It was Sonic. Sonic, but made superior though titanium-nickel alloy instead of fragile flesh and bones. It, logically, must be all that Sonic is and more.
What is Sonic? The creator's information would contain the answer. The chip mind reeled, processing the chief objective's data.
Sonic
Hedgehog
Blue
Male
Annoyingly Fast ERROR: NON-QUANTIFIABLE.
AMENDED: Fast
Three of those four points had been resolved in its creation. Its own schematics clearly stated it was metal, and that aspects of its design were modeled after a hedgehog. Notes on it debated on paint colors, settling on "Lantern Brand Cobolt Blue Spray Paint". It clocked itself at 103 mph with no registered stress on other systems. Need more testing of its true capability for speed.
"Male": unresolved.
He. His. Him.
He is Metal Sonic.
He turned sharply to make a U-turn, only just avoiding scraping his paint skin on the wall. The only superior metal version of any of the four enemies was himself, assuming the database was up-to-date.
There could be one of the pink hedgehog. He could surpass and hate Sonic; surely, another could be created to hate and surpass Amy Rose. If that were, if only it were, perhaps she would go through the same process that he had, arrived at the same conclusion. Became female. Or another gender he didn't know about.
How else could that decision possibly play out for robots like himself? Did organics too wonder this? Did the ones he was supposed to hunt ask it?
He had better stop there. It was a strange, isolated train of thought and had nothing to do with either his mission or his master. Could be rebellious.
Please the Creator. To defy Eggman, even unintentionally…
Metal copied the heretical lines of thought and created a sinkhole of compressed and zipped folders in his hard drive to house them, where not even his master would find it.